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Adele Korff Gass: Growing Up in America, Courtship and Marriage

Adele pasted the newspaper clippings from her wedding and the honeymoon photographs onto lined notepaper, which she assembled into a scrapbook. Most of the photos were not labeled on their backsides. Of the few that were labeled, the inscriptions of many were obscured because of the paste. As a result, only one group of photos can be identified with any certainty, those of people who are related to Max Gass on the side of his maternal grandmother, Chane Goos neé Schwarz who lived in Turiysk. These photographs appear to have been taken by a professional photographer.

There are two identical photos from 8 March 1937 with different Yiddish inscriptions on the back. One says “To the eternal memory for our dear cousins Matusyahu Aaron [Max] with his wife Odileh [Adele], from your cousin with his family, Yisroel Zvi Schwarz.”
The other says “In remembrance of our dear cousin Shlomo [Sam Gass] and his family from the family of Chaim Meyer and his children.

In the front row of the photo are Adele and Max. The best guess of this editor [CGV] is that Chaim Meyer and his wife are seated to the right of Max (because the inscription reads “from the family of Chaim Meyer and his children” and the other people could be his children.) To the left of Adele would be Yisrael Zvi Schwartz as he appears prominently in other photos too. And he signs his inscription “from your cousin…with his family” [not “with his children”].

What is not clear is whether Chaim Meyer’s last name is Meyer or if Meyer is his middle name. If the surname is Meyer, than he is the son of a married sister of Chana Goos’s.

This text is in Hebrew: Lemazkeret netsakh hineni, Noten et tmunatenu leadon, Matetyahu aharon uleishto

Zev Natanblit

Translation:

For eternal remembrance I present this picture to Mr. Matetyahu-Aharon and his wife,

Zev Natanblit
Europe 1937


	Note the tightly curled, kinky hair and similar hairline that the man in the left of the first photograph shares with the two in the other photographs. These three people could easily be siblings. The inscription for the last photograph is written in Russian. Translation: For good remembrance to the dear nephew Grisha. [Could this photo be intended for Max’s deceased uncle, Gershon Gass? Who else could Grisha be?]


	Who are these two young, sophisticated women? Did they survive the Holocaust? A stamp on the back of the first photograph indicates that the photographer was located in Rovno. The photo is dated 17 February 1937.

Could this woman be the same woman as found at the right end of the second row in the following photograph? Could it perhaps be a picture of a sister of Chana Goos’s (note her clothing is much older style than that of the women in the group photographs.)

The man who most likely is Yisroel Zvi Schwarz appears with Adele and Max in another group setting with two other sets of people. In the first, young children are included. The best guess is that these are Yisroel’s siblings or first cousins with their spouses and children. Perhaps the old woman in the photograph is Ysroel’s mother. The other photograph with just young adults, could be Yisroel’s siblings or cousins.

The first two photographs were printed on identical photo paper that differed from that used in the other photographs in Adele’s collection. The boy on the right in the group photo appears to be the same as the boy featured in the third photograph with a woman who is probably his mother. Could this woman be the same as the one at the left end of the row of young people in the picture immediately preceding this set?

Adele apparently took the next set of photographs as Max is featured in a few of them. It is not clear in which town they were taken or who the people are. However, the man on the right in the first photo in this sequence has a resemblance to the man in the front row, second from right of the first photograph on this page.





Unidentified relatives of Adele’s and or Max’s. It is unlikely that these people survived the Holocaust.


Max Gass was so moved by the plight of the Jewish people in Russia and Poland that when he returned home from his honeymoon he wrote two newspaper articles about his experiences.

2004 Khazin clipping

Translator and writer, Mikhail Khazin, found Max’s article on Judaism in the Soviet Russia so compelling that 67 years after it was originally published, he wrote his own article about Max and his observations. Khazin’s article was published in The Jewish Advocate in December 2004 and is reprinted here with permission from Khazin and The Jewish Advocate.

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